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Rising digital marketing trends for 2018

Happy New Year! The arrival of 2018 marks another year of trends and ideas in the digital marketing world. Let’s take a peek at what the top digital marketing brains are focusing on in the year ahead.

Making content personal
Content makes the digital world go round, especially in the lives of our customers.

Personalised content is at the heart of what emotionally engages consumers and influences B2B buyers. Research by optimisation platform Monetate found that a staggering 94% of digital professionals believe personal online content is “critical to current and future success”.

Find out what your customers truly want, and tailor digital content, (blogs and articles, like this), to meet their needs.

Merging content and SEO
The two go hand-in-hand like a perfect match, so no surprises that this trend is set to surge in the year ahead. And it could become a part of your job. Content optimisation firm BrightEdge found that 97% of digital professionals think SEO and content are becoming more integrated and therefore converging into one marketing function.

Even 52% of those marketers in the research believe that SEO is key to content marketing success. To stay ahead of the curve, it’s crucial to focus on your customer analysis to identify their interests, then marry that up with SEO data to get the most from your content.

Sharpening social media
Social media is a major part of the marketing mix. It gives you deep understanding of your users’ emotional behaviours and interests, allowing you to really drive home your brand messaging.

So, it follows that social media budgets are set to rise. The Top Rank Marketing blog says that Facebook tops the list for the most used social media platform overall.

But to really leverage the value of social, identify what social media platform is popular with your customers, then focus on creating emotionally engaging content with a narrative. That way, you increase your chances of users sharing your content – which means sharing your message – without the need for a hard sell.

Making moving images
A picture says a thousand words, but videos say 1.8 million, according to digital marketing expert James McQuivey. This was back in 2014, but with the explosion of vlogging (video blogging) channels led by charismatic influencers, it’s clear that video is big in the future of digital marketing.

The future of marketing in in your hands
Where are people watching video content? More than likely on a handheld device. More people are spending time on their mobile devices, so it’s not hard to imagine this being on the rise for the year ahead.

In fact, the data supports this. Research by Research by media data experts ComScore found that 69% of digital media interaction is spent on mobile. As Cisco noted, mobile traffic is set to increase between 2016 and 2021. Also, Google has announced a mobile algorithm due for launch in 2018, which will index mobile content and assess its popularity in online SEO rankings.

So, it makes sense to increase spend on mobile advertising, and to make sure your online content is responsive and designed mobile-first.